


I am old now, I am older

by ashintuku



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Major Rogue One spoilers, Rogue One Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 18:51:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8907922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashintuku/pseuds/ashintuku
Summary: Leia Organa remembered the Battle of Scarif. 
She never liked to discuss it, though; her expression faraway and sad whenever it was brought up. So no one ever brought it up.





	

Kes Dameron used to tell his son stories of the war, when Shara Bey was sleeping and Poe was woken up from nightmares. 

He would bundle his boy up in a blanket or two, and then clamber out of their house and up the tree that had grown and grown throughout the years; the tree that soothed like nothing else, its power wrapping around father and son in a security blanket of faith and hope and belief. The nights of Yavin IV were cool, but comfortable, and they would huddle together in the highest branches and look at the stars. Kes would tell his son about battles and victories; about old friends and legends. 

When Shara Bey died quietly in her bed, years down the road when Poe was too old to be carried anywhere by his father, Kes took him up the Tree and bundled them up in a couple of blankets, and he told his boy about Rogue One. 

They didn’t sleep that night. 

~+~

Poe Dameron grew up on all the stories of the Rebellion. 

Stories such as the adventures of Skywalker, Organa, and Solo, because they were well-known and famous and in the history books – of course he learned about them, of course he did. He studied them and wrote papers on them in the Academy and once, just once, he even met Organa while she was visiting the New Senate. But he also knew the stories of Antilles and Calrissian and Nien Nunb; of Ackbar, and Mothma, and Bey and Dameron. 

When people learned who his dad was, he got a lot of questions. When people learned who his mom was, Poe had to fend off people approaching him from every angle because talking about his mother even now was painful even through all the pride he carried. 

But he knew all the stories, from lessons and word-of-mouth and from his father’s old sojourns into memory, and he even knew the stories that rarely anyone else ever knew. 

Walking through the Resistance base, hands trailing the old cement walls, he stopped when he came across an empty hallway with a wall of names. The wall looked like it had belonged on a ship, once, but had been removed for one reason or another. Perhaps the ship had been destroyed, or repurposed; Poe couldn’t tell. But as he looked at the wall, he saw that the names were on their own plaques; small ones that could be punched out a minute at a time, each with a name and a date. Each one under a different header; each one over nearly thirty years old.   
He stood there for so long that it made him jump when someone stepped up beside him, and he looked over to see Finn staring at the names, too; curiousity written over his expressive features. It was one of the things that made Finn remarkable, to Poe, his expressiveness. He wondered if the young man was compensating for a youth of careful neutrality. 

“Blue Squadron, Red Squadron, Gold Squadron...” Finn read the names out carefully, eyes narrowed as he craned his neck back to look at the names closer to the ceiling. “Rogue Squadron... hey, there’s two Rogue Squadrons. Why’s that one called Rogue One?” 

Poe looked over at the names near the top, recognizing the names like they were old friends of his, and not practically strangers. 

“They were the first Rogue Squadron – literal rogues, if you’d like. They were Rebel soldiers and a few volunteers who went to steal the plans to the Death Star.” 

“Scarif Base,” Finn said, then, as if suddenly remembering his own histories. “That’s right, that base was destroyed during the war. Director Orson Krennic had been in charge of the base at the time.” 

“He remembered fondly?” 

Finn snorted, grimaced a smile, and Poe decided he didn’t care for that expression at all. “Remembered for being an incompetent, reaching idiot, more like.” He paused, then, looking back up at the names. “I’ve never heard of the original Rogue One.”

“There’re not a lot of stories about them,” Poe said, voice going soft. “And there’re only a handful of people left alive who remember them at all.” Tilting his head to the side, contemplating the names, he looked to Finn again with a slight smile. “I know some stories, if you want to hear?” 

Finn looked back at him, smiling that wide, curious smile that Poe liked much more, and Poe offered his arm to the ex-trooper to help him sit on the floor. Finn’s cane clattered on the ground as he dropped it, and the two leaned back against the wall. 

“Rogue One was a group of Rebel spies, back in the day, made up of people who had lost everything to the Empire and wanted to hit back in whatever way they could...” 

~+~

Leia Organa remembered the Battle of Scarif. 

She never liked to discuss it, though; her expression faraway and sad whenever it was brought up. So no one ever brought it up. 

~+~

“It all started with a man named Galen Erso,” the old man said, clutching his cane as he leaned back in his seat. The pilots of the Resistance sat gathered around him, watching him with wide eyes. Jessika ‘Testor’ Pava sat against the wall farthest from the retired general, watching him with half-hooded eyes. Temmin ‘Snap’ Wexley sat beside her on one of the few seats in the room, fiddling with what looked like a circuit board of some kind. She kept half an eye on what he was doing even as the general spoke. 

“Galen Erso was a brilliant engineer during the days of the Empire – brilliant with kyber crystals. He left during the early days of the Empire, though, disappearing with his wife, Lyra – we’re told that they became farmers on a quiet, out of the way system, trying to live quietly and raise their child away from the fighting. But the fighting came to him.” 

Jessika imagined the mossy fields of the farmer; imagined the towers and the rows and rows of plant life. Tried to imagine a scientist being happy in the dirt, and found that really, it wasn’t that hard to do. 

“Director Orson Krennic came to Galen Erso one day, years after he had disappeared. He didn’t know that the Ersos had aligned themselves, in their own way, to the Rebels at that point. The extremist Rebels, though, you should know – those under Saw Gerrera’s command. They did good work, but they were dangerous; nearly as dangerous as the Empire itself.” Here, old Draven sighed out the sigh of the weary, and he closed his eyes against regrets. Jessika wondered what an old war hero had left to regret so close to his own deathbed. 

“Galen tried to send his family away, to keep them safe – an agreement they had with Saw Gerrara, for their help in the Rebellion. But Lyra sent their daughter off by herself, and came back to aid her husband in whatever way she could. Orson Krennic killed her in front of Galen, and we’re told that Galen swore at that moment that he would have his revenge for the death of his wife and the forced abandonment of his daughter. He returned to the Empire, made himself practically integral in the development of the Death Star.” Draven sighed again, and Jessika and Snap looked over at him fully; the circuit board briefly forgotten. 

“We always assumed he joined the Empire of his own free will. That he worked towards their goals because they matched his. We always assumed he was dangerous, and it was with those assumptions that I gave the kill order to Captain Cassian Andor.” 

“Who, sir?” Jessika asked, then, because that was a name she had never heard before. It was boggling to think of the Rebellion giving out kill orders, and it was another to realize that there were people in the Rebellion who actually _did_ it. 

Draven turned to her, and the look he gave her was old and weary and haunted by ghosts older than her dreams ever would be. 

“A good soldier and my biggest regret.” 

~+~

“Cassian Andor was a pilot, see,” Kes said, holding his boy close as they looked up at the stars above them. Kes remembered battles in the stars, his wife spinning and twirling like a bird in the black, and closed his eyes against the pain. “A good one, too, back in the Rebellion’s heyday; he’d been with the Rebellion for a long time, recruiting and taking on missions that no one else could talk about.” 

“Why couldn’t they talk about them?” Poe asked, his voice younger than it had been in years. Kes paused, chewed the inside of his cheek, and sighed, leaning his chin on his son’s head. Poe squirmed, but didn’t push him away, and he squeezed him a little. 

“He was a spy,” he said eventually, looking up at the stars again. “He was good at obtaining information – knew who to talk to and what wires to cross to get what he needed. He was quick on his feet, and a good shot. A pretty decent engineer, too, when he needed to be. He rewired an old Imperial droid, one of the K-2 series, originally in order to obtain whatever secrets the droid had locked in its memory banks. He kept the droid with him, called it K-2SO, considered it his friend and his co-pilot. Your mom met them once, y’know? During one of the lulls of missions, when she was back from a patrol and he was back from whatever it was he was doing at the time.” 

Poe shifted, then, and Kes looked down to see his boy looking up at him with wide eyes. He gave him a small smile, and Poe smiled back tremulously. 

“Your mom, she described Cassian as ‘lost’. He could follow orders to the letter – could sleep with the knowledge that what he did was for the Rebellion and for freedom. But he lost his way somewhere down the line, taking orders that he never would have years previously.” 

“Bad orders?” 

“...at the time? Necessary.” 

~+~

“The girl who pulled them all together was Jyn Erso – her name’s at the top, see? She was the daughter of the chief designer to the Death Star, but she hadn’t seen him in years, too many to count. Dad told me once that she had said she hoped he was dead, for her own state of mind. Understandable; who wants to know their father created one of the most devastating weapons of war known to the galaxy?” 

Finn made a noncommittal noise, leaning his head back against the wall, and Poe brushed against his shoulder lightly, staring up at the wall intently. 

“Galen Erso created the Death Star – codenamed Stardust. We learned about that, in training. Professors called it our history, thought we should know where they made mistakes. Galen was considered a traitor.” 

“Galen was never really part of the Empire. He’d been a pacifist, but when his research into kyber crystals was used to create the super weapon, well. He decided maybe being a rebel was better, y’know?” Poe smiled, but it wasn’t really a happy smile, and he sighed through his nose. “Anyway, his daughter, Jyn – she wasn’t a rebel at all. Dad described her as a lost soul, wandering around and doing what she had to do to survive. She was a _survivor_. Raised by extremists, and then left on her own from fifteen years old after the extremists dumped her for good. He never knew why they left her.” 

Poe went quiet again, fiddling with the cuff of his jacket – a new one, the old, worn brown leather resting comfortably across Finn’s shoulders, snug around him and fitting him better than it had ever fit Poe. It comforted him to know that Finn could fit so well into anything that wasn’t white plastoid. 

“Apparently she didn’t even want anything to do with the Rebellion – the only reason she went after the Death Star plans was because her father sent her a message, and after he was killed by Rebellion fighter pilots, well. She wanted to avenge him somehow, and carrying out his wishes? Finishing his revenge? She probably thought that was the best way to go about it.” 

Finn hummed, and Poe tilted his head, looking at him from the corner of his eye. After a moment, Finn turning to look at him, frowning and looking like he wanted to ask a question. 

“What?” 

“What happened to her?” 

Poe blinked, licking his lips, before looking back to the wall of names, mind faraway to stories in treetops and warm arms. 

“...She completed her mission.” 

~+~

Luke never knew about Scarif, or Rogue One, or any of it. 

He and Han got the schematics to the Death Star all the way to the base on Yavin IV, an angry, bitter, grieving Leia between them, and they exposed the weakness that had only been a rumour. 

Luke had destroyed the Death Star. 

He had never known who to thank for that. 

~+~

Rey sat next to Chewie in front of the fire, resting her head against his furry knee as he rumbled and growled out stories to her. 

Most of the stories were about Han, but sometimes they would be about Luke, or Artoo. When he was particularly nostalgic and sentimental, he would speak of Kashyyyk: of his family, and friends, and the warriors that he watched fall during the Clone Wars. 

Tonight, though, he told her stories about Jedha, a planet that was a wasteland these days. She closed her eyes and listened to him talk about the holy Jedha City, with its Temple and the kyber crystals buried deep within the sand. Told her about the rumours he and Han had heard, during their smuggling days, about how the city had been overrun by Imperial soldiers as they mined the kyber out of the Temple; how the extremist rebels fought and killed and died for the cause, led by the paranoid Saw Gerrera, who died when the city was obliterated in a freak accident. 

He told her about the Guardians of the Whills, and when Rey repeated the name, Skywalker looked up from his conversation with Artoo and asked her where she had heard that name before. 

“Chewie just told me,” she said, and Skywalker looked contemplative for a moment, before turning to her. She sat up, recognizing the look as one of his lecturing ones, and wondered what she was going to learn. 

“The Guardians of the Whills... they were priests, of a kind. Not Jedi, but strong believers in the Force. They understood it so deeply, so intimately, that no one could ever lie around them, or sneak up on them. They could always tell when something was coming towards them.” He paused, scratching at his jaw; the metal of his hand reflecting in the firelight. “Old Ben told me about them, back when I was younger. He said he’d met a lot of them during his time, before the Empire destroyed them completely.” 

“What were they?” 

“Warrior monks,” Skywalker said, looking into the fire. “I never got to meet any myself, but Old Ben did, during his travels. He wasn’t always on Tatooine, not like me. He said he went to Jedha once, to the Temple in the city, where he met two of these men. One was a monk, a blind man. His belief and spirituality were so strong that he recognized Old Ben for what he was the moment he stepped into the Temple, and he treated him kindly and with great respect. He had a companion, a protector, who used to have faith, but...” Here, Skywalker sighed, leaning his head to the side as if listening to something or something. “...but he lost it, when the Empire took control of the galaxy and the Emperor killed all the Jedi.” 

Rey watched Skywalker; watched as his face grew long and forlorn, his eyes faraway and sad, and she wrapped her arms more tightly across her chest and hunched her shoulders in a little. Chewie rested a hand on her head, and she leaned more heavily against his knee. 

“What were their names?” 

Skywalker furrowed his brow, rubbing at his eyes, before he finally shook his head. 

“...Old Ben never told me. After he left, he lost all contact with them. And then the city was destroyed, and... and I think Old Ben gave up hoping that they were still alive.” 

Rey bit her lip, wondering what it must have been like to be one of the few Jedi left, and to have to watch as anyone and everyone you ever knew or cared about was slowly killed by something you had once believed in. 

“I hope they’re alive,” she said finally, looking away from Skywalker’s eyes as he stared at her. “...for Old Ben’s sake, I hope they’re alive.” 

~+~

“What happened to the Empire’s K-2 droids?” 

Finn looked over to see Wexley standing in front of him, his own droid by his feet and muttering angry, vicious binary at anyone who passed them. Wexley was a pilot and a friend of Poe’s, and he and Finn got along well enough, but Wexley never searched him out. Never asked him questions or anything, just left him alone to his own devices. It made things easier, at the end of it. 

Tilting his head, he pressed his lips together and tried to remember history lessons in sterile stations, taught by the mechanical drone of droids. 

“... The K-2 series of Imperial droids were destroyed, in the Battle of Scarif,” Finn said after a moment, recalling the lesson like a foggy memory. “They decided to discontinue the line afterwards, because it was found that it was too easy to reprogram them. Their only example was of K-2SO, an Imperial droid that was reprogrammed and worked with the Rebellion.” 

“Captain Andor’s Kaytoo?” 

“...I don’t know about anyone called Captain Andor, but K-2SO worked for the Rebellion. It was shut down and presumably destroyed with the others on Scarif. I don’t think it was ever really clarified what happened to it.” 

Wexley frowned, looking bothered by that, and Finn shifted a little uncomfortably; gripping onto his cane tighter than he had been, waiting for some sort of judgement on his own character based on a past he had nothing to do with but association. Wexley then sighed, shaking his head and clapping Finn on the shoulder. Finn held back the flinch as best as he could. 

“Thanks anyway, Finn – Testor and I came across some files regarding the K-2 series, and when we asked Threepio he just huffed and told us that he’d had ‘nothing to do with the giant brutes’ or whatever that means.” 

“...They were over seven feet tall and really strong if that helps?” 

Wexley blinked, before laughing and shaking his head. 

“Not really, but thanks anyway, buddy. If you’re looking for Poe, I think he went down that hallway – he seemed a bit down. Maybe if you talked to him, it’d help?” 

“Oh—yeah, sure, I’ll see if I can help. Uh, thanks Wexley!” 

“Call me Snap!” 

“Right!” 

~+~

Admiral Ackbar, when asked about the war, remembered the fallen more often than not. 

He remembered climbing aboard the derelict remains of the _Profundity_ , after the Empire was done with it; picking his way carefully through the bodies of the fallen. The remains of Darth Vader’s walk. 

He remembered coming across the bridge, and seeing Raddus sitting in the chair; a cold body left to die in the empty vastness of space. 

He remembered seeing the wall with the names of Rogue One, and he remembered ordering that his men take the wall, and clean the databanks, and pray for the fallen.

~+~

Rey remembered coming across a wanted holo once, with the face of a young, nervous man looking out at her. The image was old, and fractured, and the name was a blur of indecipherable letters. But when she showed the remains to Devi, who (despite being the same age) _knew_ things, she had exclaimed that that was just old propaganda from the war. 

“Bodhi Rook,” she exclaimed, shaking her head and snorting. “Me pa told me ‘bout him, back when he was around. Cargo pilot for the Empire – turned tail and ran soon as it got hard.” 

The story had never sat right with Rey, though, as she stared into the young, nervous eyes of Bodhi Rook. He looked scared, and beaten down, and tired. 

But he did not look like the type to run away when it got too difficult. 

No, not at all. 

Years later, when she was older and a little wiser, she came back to the Resistance’s base and went in search of Finn and Poe, who she had missed so much. 

And when she came across them sitting across from a wall covered in names, and saw Bodhi Rook’s on there, proud near the top under the call sign of Rogue One, she knew that she had been right about him. 

It gave her something like comfort. 

~+~

Leia remembered the Battle of Scarif. 

She had watched it, from the safety of the _Tantive IV_ , as Blue Squadron killed themselves, and Rebel pilots died for the cause; watched from safety as the Empire’s super weapon, codenamed Stardust, truly known as the Death Star, loomed over the horizon. 

She remembered the horror of watching it annihilate the Scarif base from the map, and she knew, deep in her heart, that the brave men and women who had flown down there in order to give a dying Rebellion hope again—she knew that they were gone. 

And so as she took the datafile with the plans from a panting soldier; as she hid it away into her faithful R2 unit and watched it and Threepio escape in a pod over a desert planet; as she refused to betray the Rebellion and watched her planet disintegrate in response—

Leia swore to herself that she would never forget, and that she would honour their sacrifices, until the day she, too, died. 

And so she did.


End file.
